I tend not to read a whole lot of nonfiction books—for the most part, if I'm going to read criticism then I tend to read it as separate essays, and usually online. But Anahid Nersessian's Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse was such an edifying and resonant experience to read. Not only did she teach me a lot about a set of poems that I hadn't thought about in years—John Keats's Great Odes—but moving through the essays in this book is a personal narrative about a relationship that, although oblique, I found both emotionally moving and intellectually fascinating, particularly in how that personal narrative functions with the more straightforward critical portions. I really enjoyed having this conversation with Anahid, and I hope you enjoy it, too.

Here are some handy episode links:

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Pocket Casts
• Goodpods
• Stitcher
• TuneIn
• Show notes
• Transcript

And some purchase links for the book! As always, I recommend picking it up from your local independent bookstore, but if you don't have one of those available, here are some other options:

• Skylight Books (Los Angeles, CA)
• The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA)
• Bookshop.org

Some additional resources that you might find interesting in conjunction with this conversation:

• Anahid has a new piece out in the New York Review of Books, titled "Catastrophic Desire," which is about the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad.
• This conversation between Anahid and her friend, the actor Zoe Kazan, about the book was one of the first sources I checked out to help shape this conversation, and I thought it was pretty enlightening.
• Similarly, this conversation between Anahid and Michael Robbins was very useful.
• I also very much enjoyed reading Anahid's NYRB piece "Love for Sale," about Eva Illouz’s The End of Love. Reading someone's critical work, I find, always gives an interesting perspective into how they think.

Happy listening!

For our first KTCO Book Club episode of the year I'm joined by writer and podcaster Maggie Tokuda-Hall to discuss Susanna Clarke's novel Piranesi! I was a huge fan of Clarke's first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and had been meaning to read Piranesi since it first came out, so I was delighted that Maggie picked it for our conversation.

Here are some handy episode links:

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• RadioPublic
• Goodpods
• Stitcher
• TuneIn
• Show notes
• Transcript

And some purchase links for the book! As always, I recommend picking it up from your local independent bookstore, but if you don't have one of those available, here are some other options:

• Mrs. Dalloway's (Oakland, CA)
• Mysterious Galaxy (San Diego, CA)
• Bookshop.org

Finally, a few other tidbits you might find interesting in association with this episode:

• You can find information about all of Maggie's books at her website, prettyokmaggie.com.
• Maggie's podcast Failure to Adapt with comedian Red Scott is a hilarious show about stories that have been adapted from one form to another. If you’re looking for a place to start, I’d suggest either the first episode—the Twilight episode with guest Sarah Gailey—or the recent Princess Bride episode with guest Chris Sarandon.
• I read a whole bunch of reviews of Piranesi in preparation for this conversation, and the one that stood out to me the most for its depth and insight was Abigail Nussbaum's review for her blog Asking the Wrong Questions.

Happy listening!

We're back! For our first episode of 2022, I'm talking with poet Yanyi. There’s a way in which the end of a serious relationship can shake your entire concept of yourself, and through your grief you have to find yourself again. Yanyi’s latest book of poems, Dream of the Divided Field, braids poems about heartbreak and implied emotional violence with poems about transition and immigration. Each has a similar but distinct sense of a loss of self, a search for self, a yearning for connection and belonging, a sometimes violent disconnection—to a partner, to a place or culture, to oneself and one’s own body. In our conversation, Yanyi and I discussed his book, deconstruction and reconstruction, attachment to nuance, and the relationship between beauty and violence. Then for the second segment, we talked about grief.

Here are some links where you can listen to the episode:

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• RadioPublic
• Goodpods
• Stitcher
• TuneIn

You can also listen to the full episode and find show notes and a transcript at the episode page on the KTCO website.

Toward the end of the first segment, Yanyi and I talked about the ways that Dream of the Divided Field is different from his first book, The Year of Blue Water. If you'd like to hear more about that book, check out our first conversation from back in 2019.

Dream of the Divided Field is available for purchase now and you can find it wherever books are sold. As always, I encourage you to purchase a copy from an independent bookstore, like The Book Catapult here in San Diego.

1. The single exclamation point in Mary Oliver's poem "I Know Someone."
2. There is this longing, I think, in Tami Haaland's poem "Not Scientifically Verifiable" about the separation between people. It's very sexy, too, I thought.
3. The way that Lisa Rhoades's captures the ephemeral moment of childhood in her poem "The Long Grass."
4. The last couplet, especially, of Rebecca Foust's poem "and for a time we lived."
5. Finally, Lyz Lenz's recent newsletter "Taking a Vacation at the End of the World": "It’s all grief. It’s some joy. And baby, I only know one way into the abyss and that’s head first."

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. Things are difficult and scary right now, I know. I'm doing my best to hold onto the ones I love, and to let go of what I need to let go of, and what needs me to let go of it.

Thanks, and take care.

1. The shadows and the softness of light in Lisa Sorgini's "Behind Glass" portrait series, reminiscent of Caravaggio, drew me in first. The sense of both isolation and connection, and the way it highlights the primacy of motherhood in this moment of history made me stay and look longer.
2. I lost my paternal grandmother last year, the matriarch of our family and the one from whom I learned about the Japanese American internment. So reading Maggie Tokuda-Hall's piece "Knowing Tama," seeing her grapple with what she can and can't know about her grandmother, was particularly poignant for me.
3. I love how attentive to the world Ada Limón's poems are, how open they are to what the world shows us, and how that openness can shake us out of interiority and make us bigger. Her poem "It's the Season I Often Mistake" felt like that.
4. I love how Gabrielle Bates' poem "Compassionate Withdrawal" seems to breathe, inhaling in preparation, hinging on a moment of blunt clarity, and then exhaling back into feeling.
5. I was absolutely delighted to see Ross Sutherland's podcast Imaginary Advice come back this week, and the first new episode (part 1 of a short series) is a spot-on and hilarious take on a Guy-Ritchie-style heist movie.
6. I loved how enthusiastic both Helena de Groot and Kaveh Akbar were in their recent conversation on Poetry Off the Shelf. And I loved the way Akbar talked about learning from his spouse how to look at the world as it is.
7. Finally, my son and I finished watching the slice-of-life anime School Babysitters last night. It was exactly the combination of heartwarming, wholesome, and hilarious that I needed right now.

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. I've gotten to spend a lot of time with my kids lately, and I'm grateful for it. I hope you have people in your life, too, for whom you're grateful.

Thank you, and take care.

1. The shadows and the softness of light in Lisa Sorgini's "Behind Glass" portrait series, reminiscent of Caravaggio, drew me in first. The sense of both isolation and connection, and the way it highlights the primacy of motherhood in this moment of history made me stay and look longer.
2. I lost my paternal grandmother last year, the matriarch of our family and the one from whom I learned about the Japanese American internment. So reading Maggie Tokuda-Hall's piece "Knowing Tama," seeing her grapple with what she can and can't know about her grandmother, was particularly poignant for me.
3. I love how attentive to the world Ada Limón's poems are, how open they are to what the world shows us, and how that openness can shake us out of interiority and make us bigger. Her poem "It's the Season I Often Mistake" felt like that.
4. I love how Gabrielle Bates' poem "Compassionate Withdrawal" seems to breathe, inhaling in preparation, hinging on a moment of blunt clarity, and then exhaling back into feeling.
5. I was absolutely delighted to see Ross Sutherland's podcast Imaginary Advice come back this week, and the first new episode (part 1 of a short series) is a spot-on and hilarious take on a Guy-Ritchie-style heist movie.
6. I loved how enthusiastic both Helena de Groot and Kaveh Akbar were in their recent conversation on Poetry Off the Shelf. And I loved the way Akbar talked about learning from his spouse how to look at the world as it is.
7. Finally, my son and I finished watching the slice-of-life anime School Babysitters last night. It was exactly the combination of heartwarming, wholesome, and hilarious that I needed right now.

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. I've gotten to spend a lot of time with my kids lately, and I'm grateful for it. I hope you have people in your life, too, for whom you're grateful.

Thank you, and take care.

1. Luisa Muradyan's poem "Quoting the Bible" turns twice, and the middle portion has this franticness that I recognized and which drew me in. But it's the ending I'm continuing to mull over.
2. Carl Phillips's poem "Is It True All Legends Once Were Rumors" feels apocalyptic to me, appropriately so. I think I've read it ten or fifteen times in the past couple of weeks.
3. Finally, I was recently introduced (via TikTok) to Nickel Creek's song "Can't Complain," from their 2005 album Why Should the Fire Die? What a gut punch of a song about an intense and deeply toxic relationship.

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. I hope you have someone to take care of you, even if it's just yourself. I know you're doing your best, and so am I.

Take care.

1. Luisa Muradyan's poem "Quoting the Bible" turns twice, and the middle portion has this franticness that I recognized and which drew me in. But it's the ending I'm continuing to mull over.
2. Carl Phillips's poem "Is It True All Legends Once Were Rumors" feels apocalyptic to me, appropriately so. I think I've read it ten or fifteen times in the past couple of weeks.
3. Finally, I was recently introduced (via TikTok) to Nickel Creek's song "Can't Complain," from their 2005 album Why Should the Fire Die? What a gut punch of a song about an intense and deeply toxic relationship.

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. I hope you have someone to take care of you, even if it's just yourself. I know you're doing your best, and so am I.

Take care.

1. The single exclamation point in Mary Oliver's poem "I Know Someone."
2. There is this longing, I think, in Tami Haaland's poem "Not Scientifically Verifiable" about the separation between people. It's very sexy, too, I thought.
3. The way that Lisa Rhoades's captures the ephemeral moment of childhood in her poem "The Long Grass."
4. The last couplet, especially, of Rebecca Foust's poem "and for a time we lived."
5. Finally, Lyz Lenz's recent newsletter "Taking a Vacation at the End of the World": "It’s all grief. It’s some joy. And baby, I only know one way into the abyss and that’s head first."

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. Things are difficult and scary right now, I know. I'm doing my best to hold onto the ones I love, and to let go of what I need to let go of, and what needs me to let go of it.

Thanks, and take care.

Just over eight years ago—eight years and thirteen days ago, to be precise—I started making a series of photographs that would eventually become my first book. The photographs and the accompanying text are about intimacy and love and the expression of love via acts of service. "Before I lived with you I never made the bed," I said. "But you like the bed to be made, and so I do. Every day."

I stopped making the bed on June 30th this year, a week after my 42nd birthday, two days after my 18th wedding anniversary. By then we weren't living together anymore, trading back and forth week-by-week between a studio apartment and the house where our kids waited for us. I only made the bed for her, I reasoned. It made sense to stop once we weren't sharing a bed anymore.

The other day while I was out grocery shopping, my daughter texted me to ask if she could bring a snack into the TV room or if she had to eat it at the table. And for a brief moment, I had no idea how to answer her. So many of my daily decisions had come to revolve around what her mom would want, or what would keep her mom from getting angry. Now that the house was mine and only mine, I was faced with the fact that I didn't know what I wanted.

I told my daughter that she could eat her snack in the TV room if she brought a plate with her and cleaned up after herself. It felt a little strange for a few minutes. But it worked out fine.

For more than half my life, I've lived for someone else. Suddenly having the main guiding force in my life gone isn't just confusing, it's intimidating. More than that, it's making me reckon with the idea that I'm not nearly as grown up as I thought I was. Adulthood is defined by the balance of freedom and accountability. You're free to make your own choices, but you're accountable for the consequences of those choices. If my choices are driven by a need to please someone else, that's codependency. If they're driven by a fear of making someone else mad, that's anxiety. If they're driven by an opposition to some perceived authority or rule, that's just adolescence. The question is: what do I want? The answer, so far, is that I'm not sure. But I know that I'll only really find out if I spend some time on my own.

I started making the bed again.

Sometimes.

When I want to.